ye

and strongly to predispose the constitution to all kinds of anomalous nervous affections. But there are evils attendant upon this habit which are more serious than those which affect the physical constitution; we mean, the unbalancing of man's moral nature, by leading to distorted views of human inability. We have already alluded to the proneness of man to try to comply with the claims of duty, by voluntary efforts to engender feeling, when those claims require action. It is true that a course of obedient action always implies a corresponding state of the affections; and that state of the affections is frequently adduced in Scripture as a test of character. But then voluntary action is constantly appealed to as a test of the genuineness of the affection, and is the experimentum crucis by which hypocrisy is made to assume its own coloring. "If love me, keep my commandments." "Whoso keepeth his word, in him verily is the love of God perfected." The sinner, in thinking of returning to God, is constantly led by the tendencies of his depraved mind, and perhaps by erroneous instructions, to exert the power of the will, in trying to engender right affections in the soul. He repeats the effort again and again, and summons all the energies of body and mind to the mighty struggle. He at length learns, by bitter experience, the important truth, that the affections are not voluntary states of the mind, that the feelings and emotions do not rise and fall at the direct bidding of the will. But at the same time, he falls into an error fearfully dangerous in its consequences. From the failure of his efforts to feel right, he concludes he can do nothing to secure his own salvation. If fortunately, the individual is at last brought by the blessing of God to a knowledge of the truth as it is in Jesus, he soon forgets the plain path by which he has been led, while every circumstance connected with the sore struggle and bitter agonies, through which he passed, in trying by a direct effort of the will to change the state of his affections, is recollected with painful exactness, and dwelt upon with melancholy interest, as the sad proof of man's entire inability. His views are seized upon by the impenitent, and perverted to their own destruction. They conclude that their salvation depends upon an arbitrary fatality, and in no sense upon their own voluntary obedience; and they settle down to a hardened indifference to their own immortal interests. Or perhaps the sinner, often straining his faculties to the utmost to rectify his feelings by some instantaneous effort of the will, concludes at last that his case is hopeless, that his

doom is already sealed in the counsels of eternity, and dismisses all further concern or effort for his own salvation. Or, perchance, he comes to the still more fearful conclusion, that religion is a delusion, immortality but a dream of the imagination. Again, the sinner, by straining the will in the manner above described, unsettles the functions of the nervous system, and thus subjects himself to strange bodily sensations, spectral illusions, etc. And we apprehend the cases are not few, in which the mind, under such circumstances, seizes upon some thrilling sensation pervading the body, or some phantom of a disordered brain, as the evidence of acceptance with God, and rests satisfied with a false and delusive hope.

We have discussed the connection between the will and the emotive states of the mind at greater length, than we intended in commencing this article. But we could not well say upon that point what was necessary to the elucidation of the main subject of this discussion, without subjecting ourselves to the danger of misapprehension, unless we were more full and explicit than we had at first designed. On the other hand, to have answered every objection which might possibly arise in the mind of any, against the views which we have presented, would have been inconsistent with the main design of the discussion, and would have swelled this article to an immoderate length. We shall therefore hold ourselves in readiness to answer objections when they are offered, or to confess our errors when they are pointed out. We have expressed our views with freedom, but, we trust, candor. However our opinions may be regarded, we trust a candid public will accord to us the merit of calling attention to a subject of vital importance to the cause of truth and piety.

SECOND SERIES, VOL. VI. NO. II.

9

ARTICLE IV.

THE A POSTERIORI ARGUMENT FOR THE BEING OF GOD.

By Rev. L. P. Hickok, Prof. of Theol., West. Res. College, Ohio.

In a former article* we examined the nature and application of the a priori argument to the proof of the being of God; and it is the object of the present, to give a similar attention to the a posteriori argument. We thus follow out our primary design of investigating the nature and validity of all logical proof for the existence of God. Much the same order of investigation will be pursued in this as in the former case,—an examination of the nature of the argument, the methods of its application, and the amount of proof which it affords.

It

I. The nature of the a posteriori argument for the being of God. In general it may be said, that it is directly the reverse of the a priori form of argument. Instead of deducing logical consequences from their grounds or causes, it begins with consequences, and reasons upwards to their grounds or causes. is thus an argument from effect to cause. It necessarily presupposes experience, inasmuch as its data are all empirical. The ultimate principles and absolute truths, which are the elements of an a priori argument for the being of God, are of no use as the materials of an a posteriori argument; but facts of observation, events, changes, phenomena, effects of all kinds are assumed as the data for finding both the existence and the characteristics of their remote origin, ground, or cause. These are all acquired from external nature through the senses, or from our own inward experience through consciousness, and thus belong entirely to our sensitive cognitions; while the whole field of rational cognition, with its intuitions of universal and necessary truth, lies within the domain of the a priori form of argument alone.

But while all the materials which form the data for an a posteriori argument are given by experience, the principle by which valid conclusions are deduced from these data is itself a rational intuition, and independent of all experience. The vin

* Biblical Repository, April, 1841, p. 273.

culum which is to bind every conclusion to its premise is the axiom that " every event must have an adequate cause." No matter what are the facts or events which we assume, they must be utterly useless for all the purposes of an a posteriori argument, except upon the clear recognition of the necessary truth of this axiom. If events may take place absolutely uncaused and fortuitous, if any thing may spring into being from absolute nihility of both essence and efficiency, then of course no deduction from any event upwards to the cause of that event can be valid; since, instead of its having any cause, it may have come into being with no agency whatever, and thus be evolved from utter emptiness and vacuity. We are then obliged, in order to feel the validity of any a posteriori argument, to obtain settled and clear convictions of the law of causation, which is the only principle by which deductions can be made from facts to their sources.

In the world of both matter and mind we find one event followed by another, and among these cases of succession, the mind recognizes some peculiarity in the case of some of the antecedents, as other than a mere casual succession in their connection with their consequents; and, to mark this peculiarity, the antecedent is called the cause, and the consequent the effect. That which secures the perpetuity of this order of sequences is called power. The main inquiry is in relation to this idea of power. Whence is it derived? What is the ground of conviction that, in like circumstances of the antecedent, this power will secure the consequent? How can we verify the conviction which we feel, that like causes will always produce like effects? These inquiries, which are each of a similar nature, go to the basis of all our confidence in an a posteriori argument:

That philosophy which derives all its ideas from sense and reflection upon the ideas given by sense, has given different answers, and adopted different theories to account for our conviction that there is some necessary connection between a cause and its effect. As expérience is the origin of all its ideas, so the idea of power, or necessary connection between cause and effect, must be gained from experience. But as sense or experience can give us nothing but the simple fact of succession, there are found considerable difficulty and diversity, in accounting for the idea of something called power, which is the origin of the expectation or conviction, that whenever we see the antecedent or cause, we shall also always see it accompanied by

its consequent or effect. Sense certainly can never find any thing in the cause which we call power; it can never verify that there is any thing there which makes the effect necessary; it can only recognize the simple fact, that when and where the antecedent is then and there the consequent is.

We can take the theory of Hume, and say that the mind gets this idea of necessary connection by the frequent experience of the repetition of the sequences. The transition of the thought and attention from the antecedent to the consequent gives a peculiar "impression," exceedingly faint at first, but by repetition growing stronger, until it arises to a definite conviction, a full "belief" that this connection will be invariable: "Belief being only a more vivid, forcible and steady conception of an object, than what the imagination alone can attain." There is thus in reality no necessary connection. It is only an imagination at first, and this strengthened to "belief" by frequent repetition. When we reason from effect to cause, therefore, there is only "belief" which has grown out of imagination, as the connecting principle, and which can never verify itself by any proof. It consists with real skepticism as to the fact, though the mind has received by mere repetition " a vivid impression" which it calls "belief."

The theory of Brown is but a modification of the above. There is nothing but mere antecedent and consequent; still the mind of man is so formed that it believes, even from one experience, that the connection will be invariable, and expects it accordingly. But it is all resolved into the nature of the human mind. There is no truth in reality which can by any means be verified; but we are so made as to expect that what has been once seen as an antecedent, will henceforth invariably continue so.

Or it may be assumed that we get the idea from induction. We have found by experience so many facts which imply that there is something in the cause making the effect necessary, that, from this wide induction, we at length feel warranted in deducing a general law, and affirming that all causes are necessarily connected with their effects. All our reasoning from effect to cause can be demonstration, therefore, only in such cases as we can verify by experiment; and as no experience can bring the cause of the universe under human cognition, so we can never reason otherwise than to a probable conclusion, when we attempt, a posteriori, to find the author of the universe. Lastly, it may be supposed that we get the idea of power, and